Monday, February 28, 2011

I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society, and the common perception is that we live the life of rock-stars and party all night with all the other glamorous people.

Not so.

I sit in my office (which used to be in the basement, now it's a room above the garage), usually in my ratty bathrobe, reading and writing email all day. And a lot of wasting time while waiting for people to answer or just report problems. I go to bed at ten, and wake up at seven to get the kids to school. And then it all repeats.

So not glamorous. When I actually write code (which is usually in the mail reader these days - mostly telling people "do it like this" rather than actually writing real code), that's about the most exciting part of the day.

But then, once in a while, I get to live the high life. This weekend, we got invited to the Night Before Oscar party (thanks Renée and Doug!) because sometimes the companies I work with apparently think that I need to get a night out.

Toto, I don't think we're talking white-socks-and-sandals any more.

So me and the wife were completely out of our depth, and knew absolutely nobody. We go out for a date night every week, so we a fair number of movies, but we really aren't movie people - the kinds of movies we go to don't make a huge impression. So there we were, cram-packed with celebrities, not remembering names or faces.

The good news was, that as Tove said, there was no real downside. Nobody knew us, and nobody would ever remember us the next day. So we could go whole retard quite openly, and brazenly just ask people "You look really familiar, who are you?". Which we did. With some discreet google image searches when we could guess, and just wanted to verify it ("John Cusack or Paul Rudd?").

Everybody seemed to take it in good cheer. We interrupted David Spade chatting up Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis (that's what Tove says, I was oblivious - it's those famous geek social graces again. I told her I'm sure I'd have noticed Natalie Portman and that she can't possibly have been there, but whatever), and Tove pissed off Warren Beatty by asking his name not just once, but twice.

So here's a shout-out to my new BFF's Jon Hamm and DJ.

We probably won't be invited again. But we have pictures for the kids, to prove to them that their parents are cool people.

Monday, December 6, 2010

The kids all got their black belts in TKD a couple of weeks ago, and what do I find in the mailbox today if it isn't their "thank you" notes that they apparently wrote as part of that whole experience.

(Side note: they put them in the mail without any stamps. So the USPS happily returned them to the sender address - the kids' - which obviously happened to be the same as the actual destination. Either there's somebody at the USPS that goes "Aww, how cute, more clueless children in action", or I can see a gaping hole in the USPS business plan)

And I'm starting to see a pattern about this whole "thank you" business. I blogged about a similar event last year ("Parenting gold star (?)") where Celeste - under similar forced circumstances - was thanking us for being such great parents and not flushing their dead pets down the toilet.

This time around, she apparently had an even harder time to figure out what to thank us for. Because this is what she says: "Thank you for caring enough to feed me". Yes, there's more, but that's the opening line. Wow. We're really top-notch parents. Because we care just enough to feed our kids!

Apparently childhood in the Torvalds family is a tough affair. There's this constant nagging worry about the parents caring enough that the kids are being fed. Only to be occasionally overshadowed by the terror of dead pets being flushed.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

It's not the greatest picture ever taken in the history of man-kind, but that blurry thing inside the plastic container is a small cute bat being very angry at being caught. The rock face is the fireplace in the kids playroom.

You can kind of see the mouth and the three-inch-long fangs bared, ready to spill the blood of its captors. What you cannot hear is the furious roaring of its mighty mouth, but if you mentally visualize the old MGM Lion, you can kind of imagine what it didn't sound like.

I have no idea how it actually got into our house, but with a graceful flick of the red construction paper, I got it just barely out the door, and it flew away.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Yeah, I'm not talking about the number of burgers McD supplies each second or anything like that. No, I'm talking about our fully automatic coffee maker. I just did a cleaning cycle, and ended up looking up what the coffee count was.

I may have an addiction problem.

Now, admittedly this is a coffee maker that we've had for something like 8 years, but that's still 4.7 doubleshots of coffee supplied every day for those eight years (you can ask for a single or a double, and the counter just counts "events").

Ok, I lie. The coffee maker counts the different types of coffee it makes separately, and "only" about two thirds of the events are actually double-shots. But I make that up by still supporting Starbucks (and Peet's) enough to make up the difference. And Tove accounts for about half, so when I say that I have an addiction problem, I should probably have said "we".

So every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Being known as a Finn living in the US, sometimes people send me pointers to things Finnish.

Now, this weekend is obviously the Eurovision song contest (you all knew that, right?). And I expect Finland to do as well as it usually does ("Finland, nul point" - it's a national tradition!), and you can spend up to several minutes on youtube transfixed by the glory, or just start from the official home page.

But before that glorious tradition had time to take off, Tim Elliott sent me this gem of Finnish culture seen from the outside: the sauna championships.

What can I say? We have a sauna in our house. Even if we don't use it all that often, it's a Finnish thing.